Mention the name Peter Wilson and most people will look at you blankly. Throw in London 2012 and there’s a flicker of recognition. Explain that he was the Dorset farmer’s son with the gun, the tall guy who fell to his knees after winning gold in the Olympics double trap clay shooting, and it all comes flooding back. The diminutive sheikh who coached him, the Russian rival who tried in vain to whip up support from the partisan crowd in Woolwich, and that extraordinary show of emotion when Peter shot the final two clays to clinch victory.

“I had hoped to be so cool,” Peter, 26, recalls now. “If I won, I was going to raise my hand and turn to the crowd. Instead, I sank to the ground and cried like a baby.”

It wasn’t the most glamorous gold medal of London 2012, or the most watched, but it did it for me. Perhaps it was the hypnotic slow-motion footage of the orange clays dissolving into purple powder when they were hit. Or the earthy, straight-talking Peter, who grew up in Sherborne, Dorset, a corner of the world I know well. There were no “Mobots” or lightning bolts at his moment of victory, just an outpouring of relief at a job well done by a regular West Country boy. It suddenly made it all seem possible, as if a gold medal was within reach of us all. Shooting clays couldn’t be that hard, could it?

Three months later, I am at the Southern Counties shooting ground, eight miles north of Dorchester. It’s Peter’s local club and the place is buzzing. According to the Clay Pigeon Shooting Association, there has been a nationwide surge in people wanting to shoot, inspired by Peter’s victory.

“We’ve seen an uptake in all forms of shooting,” confirms Anthea Hillyer, chief instructor at the Southern Counties club and no mean shot herself —she won seven world titles.

Peter is going to coach me, with the same Italian Perazzi MX2005 gun he used to win gold. He hasn’t arrived yet but his presence is everywhere: a newspaper cutting pinned to the noticeboard, showing Peter with Prince Harry; a copy of Pull! magazine with him on the cover. When he finally strolls through the doors — firm handshake, upright gait, aquiline nose — he’s welcomed like a returning hero. But there’s a fair amount of ribbing, too.

“He looks so tall, doesn’t he?” one old club member says, loud enough to be overheard.

“Didn’t look so tall when he fell to his knees, did he?” jokes another.

You sense that Peter, who is 6ft 6in, will never be allowed to forget the way he reacted to victory. Or the two “dropped birds” in his final 10 shots. He needed seven out of 10 to win, six for a draw.

“It doesn’t help if you miss the first two,” he says. “In six years, I’ve never missed a pair in competition. I kicked myself. Going into that last 10 shots, I made the mistake of thinking, 'I’m the boy, I’m a gold medallist in London.’ Part of the problem was that I couldn’t get the theme tune to Reservoir Dogs out of my head.”

His mother, father and girlfriend, artist Michelle McCullagh, were at the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich to watch him, along with 3.7 million television viewers. But the clubhouse in Dorset was packed, too. “We all sighed and swore when he missed those two,” says Martin, who has worked at the club for 20 years. “If I’d been there in Woolwich, I’d have kicked him up the backside for missing them.”

Jon Stock with Peter Wilson who is wearing the gold medal he won in the double trap clay shooting at the London games (ANDREW CROWLEY)

Today, I fear the missing will be done by me rather than Peter. I have tried clay shooting only once, on a stag weekend 20 years ago, and I can’t be certain I hit anything. Before we start, though, he wants to show me the underground pit where the clays are fired from traps. It’s half way down the range and I sense he’s spent an unhealthy amount of time in here. Boxes and boxes of clays are stacked up in the corner like munitions in an army bunker. Between January and the Olympics, he shot 50,000 rounds. “It’s a very lonely sport,” he says.

Wilson took it up competitively only six years ago. As a child, he was more keen on squash and cricket, but he damaged his shoulder in a snowboarding accident while he was at Millfield School. (He was there with fellow London Olympian Helen Glover, a good friend who won gold in the rowing.) After becoming junior European champion in 2006, Peter was signed up by Team GB. Two years later, his funding, £9,000 a year, was withdrawn after UK Sport cut its shooting budget. They were dark days, but he responded by working in bars and restaurants in the evenings and training by day.

“I quickly realised it wasn’t going to work,” he says. “I was getting home at 2am and then going to the gym at 7am the next morning. I was too tired to shoot straight.”

I can’t use the same excuse as I miss my first eight shots. “Lean forward, keep your hips straight, rest the gun against your chest, not your bicep, and move up through the target,” Peter says, telling me about the two bead sights. “Make sure the beads are in a figure of eight and keep the target just above them.”

When I continue to miss everything, a clearly worried Peter gives me an eye dominance test, just to make sure I’m closing the correct eye, which I pass. My problem, it seems, is that I’m looking across the barrel rather than straight down it. He announces it’s time to change weapons. Thrilling though it is to use the shotgun that won gold, I am struggling with its “anatomical” stock that has been specially moulded for Peter’s grip. He’s right-handed and I’m left-handed.

Two minutes later, I’m on target with a left-handed gun, much to everyone’s relief. Breaking clays is a fantastic feeling but, try as I might, I can’t bag a pair. In “double trap”, two clays are released in quick succession. He tells me to aim for the left one first, followed by the right. Then we switch it around, but to no avail. “It seems you can hit the left one, and you can hit the right one, but not together,” he concludes, as we decide to call it a day.

Peter would have quit the sport for good if it hadn’t been for his parents, who stepped in and funded him for eight months. “My father told me to prove to him how good I was,” he says, as we drive back to his family’s 200-acre stud farm in the small Dorset village of Glanvilles Wootton. The front door of the farmhouse is still painted gold (a postbox was painted gold in nearby Sherborne). Bunting and a Union Jack are flying on the front lawn, a reminder of the warm welcome he received from villagers. And there are horses, dogs and stable hands everywhere, all equally pleased to see him. “I knew he’d be all right in the final,” his mother says proudly of her only child. “He’s got nerves of steel.”

Peter owes an even greater debt to Sheikh Ahmed bin Mohammed bin Hasher Al Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s ruling family who won gold in the double trap in Athens in 2004. Peter approached the prince at the Beijing games, where Al Maktoum had just failed to qualify for the final, and asked him for some advice. Al Maktoum told him he was going to quit competitive shooting and become a coach, and Peter would be his first pupil. What’s more, he would teach him for free. “Ahmed got me to change everything: my mental attitude, my gun, cartridges, physique. He threw them all up in the air and we started again.”

Peter spent two months every year in the UAE, where Al Maktoum would offer cash prizes (up to £1,500) to the hard-up Peter to simulate the pressure of competitions. He also liked to whisper distracting things in Peter’s ear at crucial moments to help him channel his thoughts and shut off the outside world. They would spend hours on the phone and on Skype to each other, too. It clearly worked. Earlier this year, he took the double trap world record in Arizona, shooting an astonishing 198 out of 200 clays.

A few days after his Olympic success, Peter took a call from the Sheikh, who was back in Dubai. “I was on the bus to the Olympic Village when he rang. He told me that my gold was the proudest day of his life. 'You are my brother, you can stay here whenever you like,’ he said. We were both crying – it was a very emotional moment.”

Since then, Peter has been busy enjoying his new-found fame and hoping – finally – to carve out a decent living for himself by promoting the sport he loves. He has already appeared on A Question of Sport and The Alan Titchmarsh Show, and now charges anything from £5,000 to £20,000 for corporate appearances. Rio is looming on the horizon but he has no plans to shoot competitively until the new year. Gun and clothing endorsements beckon and he plans, one day, to become a coach. Let’s face it, if he can teach me to shoot straight, he must be good.